the people had given up their children, not being able to support them, and the Governor would have the children bound to the busha, “and then,” said they, “we might whistle for our children!” In this manner the apprentices, the parents, reasoned.  They professed the greatest anxiety to have their children educated, but they said they could have no confidence in the honest intentions of their busha.

The views given above, touching the results of entire emancipation in 1840, are not unanimously entertained even among the planters, and they are far from prevailing to any great extent among other classes of the community.  The missionaries, as a body, a portion of the special magistrates, and most of the intelligent free colored people, anticipate glorious consequences; they hail the approach of 1840, as a deliverance from the oppressions of the apprenticeship, and its train of disaffections, complaints and incessant disputes.  They say they have nothing to fear—­nor has the island any thing to fear, but every thing to hope, from entire emancipation.  We subjoin a specimen of the reasoning of the minority of the planters.  They represent the idea that the negroes will abandon the estates, and retire to the woods, as wild and absurd in the extreme.  They say the negroes have a great regard for the comforts which they enjoy on the estates; they are strongly attached to their houses and little furniture, and their provision grounds.  These are as much to them as the ‘great house’ and the estate are to their master.  Besides, they have very strong local attachments, and these would bind them to the properties.  These planters also argue, from the great willingness of the apprentices now to work for money, during their own time, that they will not be likely to relinquish labor when they are to get wages for the whole time.  There was no doubt much truth in the remark of a planter in St. Thomas in the East, that if any estates were abandoned by the negroes after 1840, it would be those which had harsh managers, and those which are so mountainous and inaccessible, or barren, that they ought to be abandoned.  It was the declaration of a planter, that entire emancipation would regenerate the island of Jamaica.

* * * * *

We now submit to the candid examination of the American, especially the Christian public, the results of our inquiries in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica.  The deficiency of the narrative in ability and interest, we are sure is neither the fault of the subject nor of the materials.  Could we have thrown into vivid forms a few only of the numberless incidents of rare beauty which thronged our path—­could we have imparted to pages that freshness and glow, which invested the institutions of freedom, just bursting into bloom over the late wastes of slavery—­could we, in fine, have carried our readers amid the scenes which we witnessed, and the sounds which we heard,